Black/urban Format S Tops In New Acts

April 15, 1985|By Richard Defendorf of the Sentinel Staff

Giving talent a break: What format introduced the most new acts in 1984? If you guessed black/urban, you are right on the money. According to Ken Barnes, a columnist for Radio & Records magazine, acts such as Whitney Houston, Alexander O'Neal and Rock Master Scott were among the nine new names touted by black/urban.

Barnes' numbers indicate that no format introduced unusually large numbers of new names. Contemporary-hits radio did okay, though it's ''new'' artists -- such as singers Mick Jagger and David Lee Roth -- were merely big- name band members with first-time solo albums.

I asked Barnes about artist-breaking trends of the past.

''Since about '82, the contemporary-hit radio format has been breaking a lot more new acts than it used to,'' he says, adding that adult-contemporary formats probably are the most conservative when it comes to new names, and country is almost as slow.

Black/urban relies more on novelty, Barnes says. ''It's just a constant flow of new things, and it doesn't really have any oldies formats within it.'' Burnout prevention: As we all know, there is no such thing as a ''new'' promotional idea in radio. The trick is to recycle an old gimmick, give it a new twist or shuffle it into a market where it hasn't been used.

But wait. Harvey Tate, general manager of WJYO-FM (107.7), thinks he has come up with a first. To help keep his announcers from snapping under the constant pressure to be wonderful while on the air at WJYO, Tate has arranged for them to meet, as a group, with licensed hypnotist Ann Joyce Johns for about two hours on Tuesday afternoon.

The hypnotism session is being used to put his announcers in a ''great frame of mind,'' Tate says. ''This is about 60 percent serious and 40 percent publicity.''

Right now, it sounds like 100 percent serious publicity. However, Johns says that the announcers will actually be able to enhance their on-air performances with a continued program of self-hypnosis. The question now is: Will WJYO's staff of entranced disc jockeys be able to fend off the competition -- easy-listening WSSP-FM (104.1) -- which will invade the market next month?

WJYO's not-so-easy competition: Sometime between 5:30 and 7:30 a.m. May 2, WSSP-FM will indeed begin going head-to-head with WJYO. The ''Wssper,'' as it calls itself, will switch its format from country to easy listening and begin broadcasting at 100,000 watts via a newly constructed radio tower in Bithlo.

Included on the WSSP playlist: songs by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Paul Mauriat, Montovanni, as well as a light dusting of tunes by pop singers such as Neil Diamond, Paul Simon and Lionel Ritchie.

Time capsule: WDIZ-FM (100.3) alarmed its listeners (and delighted hard- rock haters) by telling them that WDIZ would become ''a thing of the past'' last Tuesday. Well, it did. April 9 was WDIZ's 14th birthday, which the station celebrated by broadcasting, in about 24 hours, the music and news of each year of the station's existence. Each ''year'' was given 100 minutes of air time.

Listener response?

''A lot of people were flipped out,'' says general manager Rad Messick. ''I guess they were afraid we were going to change format and turn into a punk-gospel station, or something like that.''